A huge rumor is floating around the UK this weekend, topped off with articles in the British Sunday papers: Yahoo is said to be in talks with Bebo about a $1 billion acquisition.

The site, launched in 2005, has been the source of many acquisition rumors - most notably with Viacom - but this one has the strongest signal, having been picked up by the mainstream press. Incidentally, Viacom has also shown interest in buying Last.fm, another success in the UK (see Viacom-Last.fm).

If it goes ahead, the acquisition would be almost twice the size of News Corp's $580m MySpace buy, but cheap compared to Facebook, for which Yahoo was prepared to pay $1.6 billion at one point (Facebook is now worth much more). Bebo has around 25 million users, and founder Michael Birch has previously said that he’d like to keep the site independent - a Bebo IPO may even be possible.

MySpace will acquire Flektor, a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Flektor competes with more established startups like Slide and RockYou, and launched only a few weeks ago. Still, insiders say that the company has developed a killer set of tools to create slide shows as well as much more elaborate widgets that include audio, video, photos, text, effects and transitions. In our testing v. Slide and RockYou, Flektor came out way ahead in usability and features.

It's an odd acquisition, though, since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

"Every day, we are hit from all sides with negativity," said Mark Hager, founder of Happy Posts. "We wanted to create a place where anyone from any background could tell about the good things that happen to them. We're not concerned about where you’re from, what you do or what you believe," Hager said when asked about their target demographics. "We're looking to create a grass-roots movement with the sole purpose of creating the world’s largest repository of every day miracles."

The initiative starts today with the launch of social networks for seven contemporary hit radio stations across the country. KYLD-FM (WILD) San Francisco bows The Wild Space, WKSC-FM (Kiss) Chicago introduces The Mob, WHTZ-FM (Z100) New York has the Z-Zone, WIHT-FM (Hot 99.5) Washington D.C. has the Hot Spot, KDWB-FM (103.1 KDWB) Minneapolis is launching Connect, KHKS-FM (Kiss) Dallas bows Kiss Nation and WLDI-FM (WILD) West Palm Beach also is introducing a network called The Wild Space.

The sites will be individually managed by each station but share a common format and architecture. Onesite.com, a provider of social networking technology solutions to third parties, is handling the back-end for the networks. Onesite, a subsidiary of web hosting company Catalog.com Inc., provides similar services to the likes of NBC Universal's iVillage. Evan Harrison, executive VP of Clear Channel and head of its online music and radio unit, sees the local element of the sites as an important differentiator between other social networking destinations.

Not only can Clear Channel monetize the sites with targeted online spots from local advertisers, he says but also people using the networks have a better chance of making lasting connections with other users because they will share more regional affiliations. By contrast other social networks are focused on national and even international audiences.

***

Clear Channel plans to drive traffic to the social networks via the "listen Live" Web radio streaming area on the flagship sites of the stations. As part of the initiative, each station that has a social network will introduce a new chat feature in the web radio player that will feature profile pictures of members of the social network who are participating in the chat.

Users will be able to click on the user profiles in the chat area to enter and explore the social network. Stations will also promote the social networks through on-air plugs and special stunts and promotions centered around the sites.

Each social network will have a user experience similar to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and others offer. Users can create profiles, customize them with HTML codes and widgets, upload photos, music and video, blog, and add friends.

The largest cohort of activity (wholly 30%) takes place in the Gaia forums, and here's where the truly staggering numbers come in: Averaging a million posts a day and a billion posts so far, Gaia's message boards (with topics running the gamut from pop culture to politics) is second only to Yahoo in popularity.

Craig Sherman has been thinking what the value-proposition of his site in the era of MySpace or Facebook. "In a world where teens are constantly branding and packaging themselves" on sites like those, he points out, "Gaia is where you get away from it all."

Instead of monthly subscriptions, Gaia Online sells "rare items" - treasures, fantastically cool fashion accessories for player avatars, and so on - two offered a month for $2.50 each. Subscribers buy them via credit card, Pay Pay, cellphone - or cash on the barrel. ("We employ someone full time whose job is getting dollars and quarters" out of envelopes kids send them, Sherman notes.)

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we've heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 - $45 million).

StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click "Stumble!" and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person "stumbling." More often than not, it's something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006.

People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content. The StumbleUpon site says they have 2.1 million users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are "stumbled" daily.

StumbleUpon has only raised a single $1.5 million round of seed financing.

A trusted source tells me that the online social networking site Facebook plans to open its tightly controlled site to outside widgets, allowing users to embed outside audio, video, and other content onto their profile pages for the first time. Ironically, this move comes just as MySpace tightens up its widget policies, meaning that the two sites could come to resemble each other a lot more than they do now.

Rolling Stone is the "authority figure" for judging music (just check out all their Wikipedia links), which doesn't reflect this generation's obsession with consumer-generated content. Blanchard plans to launch a separate site that will be a social network for music fans, complete with profiles and the ability to have a say in their "Best of" lists. Blanchard called it the "American Idol version of lists." Let's hope Sanjaya doesn't make it on any of those.

Blanchard also plans on digitizing all 1,000 back issues of Rolling Stone, to be available on the website or to purchase as a DVD set. This may be done by Christmas, so you can check Dad off the list.

I think RollingStone.com's makeover is highly overdue, and this is the perfect way to do it: keep the magazine just the way it is but add another online element that embodies youth culture.

When Keith Blanchard, Wenner Media's executive director for online media, including Us Weekly, Rolling Stone, and Men's Journal, asked our journalism class how many people visit Rolling Stone's website, only one person raised his hand.

This action by MySpace means that all of the videos and remixes you created will no longer show up on your MySpace profile and comments section. More specifically, if you attempt to add new videos or remixes to your profile, they will be removed.

We are not happy about this and we're pretty sure you're not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you've all been really embracing videos at Photobucket -- to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photubucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media. MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.

The release of Coop will be a killer blow to Flock, a privately backed social browser that is being built on top of Mozilla code base. Flock aims to do exactly what Mozilla has just announced, in fact their is such an overlap of features that the Mozilla team decided to put the snapshot of Flock in their wiki page as an example. Above all it teaches us that building upon others technology is just like building castles on sand. We have now seen this numerous times, first Alexa shutting doors to Statsaholic and now Mozilla decided to build an in house version of Flock.

Another impact of the browser would be on the social networks that rely on the generation of massive page views by users while they are browsing each others profiles. The status information on your friends in the browser sidebar will remove the need to view the profiles on the social networks itself.

Facebook tells us the site is seeing about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month - statistics that haven't been released until now. That's a huge jump.

First, myself and non-college friends appear to be getting more unsolicited invites from others - including those not in school - to connect on Facebook. Facebook is going mainstream.

But there’s an undercurrent of development happening, suggesting Facebook may be seeing serious momentum in other ways. It's old news that Facebook opened its application programming interface last year, which lets software developers outside Facebook build other applications on top of Facebook's platform and data. The open project is called the Facebook Platform. But Facebook’s growth over the past several months, and improvement to its API policy, deserve attention.

Imagine Facebook user profiles and networks everywhere. In a suite of office software. In an online classroom. In a family's entertainment system. In whatever application developers choose to connect with.

There is a secret sauce here -- once somebody has stored their photo somewhere they will guard it zealously. Their online social life, so built around images, depends on it. That is what excites CEO Welch. "We're fad-proof," he declares. "If one social networking site goes away and another comes up the user just moves, but their content stays with Photobucket." He tries hard not to compete with the sites where his users congregate, which he calls "the social edge." "We focus very much on not being a community," Welch explains. "We let the communities build around us."

A recent story on News.com tried to poke holes in the Photobucket, so to speak, by saying that "critics" claimed the business would be at risk if MySpace ever withdrew permission to host links there. But that's about as likely as MySpace simply ejecting members by the millions. If it prohibited their precious links it would face a user revolt.

But in fact the flexibility Photobucket gives users to shift their links to other sites does enable them to flee MySpace, something many teenagers have recently been doing as they migrated to Facebook, where security and control provisions are greater.

The real risk to Photobucket would be if the next hot social network were able to become popular while prohibiting linking from the outset. But given how users have learned to behave, that might be difficult to achieve.

Students at a suburban Catholic school are being ordered to take down their photos, snappy comments, or anything else they may have posted on MySpace.com.

Friday is the deadline for students at St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School to follow orders or risk suspension. School Principal Sister Margaret Van Velzen sent letters home to parents this week saying, in part, that if families allow children to continue their MySpace.com sites, they will not be allowed to return to school. The school plans to use its computer-savvy staff members to monitor the site for student activity.The principal declined comment, but St. Hugo office manager Judy Martinek said the principal just wants to keep the students safe.

"We've stated our position and we hope all students are in the process of taking down their sites by tomorrow," said Martinek.

"She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It's intense. For right now."

I wasn't sure what the "technosexual generation" is either. Lucky, he goes on to explain. "Technosexuals" is apparently a new marketing buzz word for young people who use text messaging and blogging in order to meet and arrange hookups.

Yeah, yeah, I know. All the cool kids are doing it these days. But ew. Something about that description kind of makes me want to stop blogging forever and communicate with others only through Morse code. I feel, I dunno. Dirty.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

Utah Street Networks was founded in 2003 and has seven employees based in San Francisco, Calif. The Utah Street Networks technology and certain members of team will join CMSG led by Dan Scheinman, Senior Vice President and General Manager. The deal does not include the Tribe.net site, which will remain completely independent of Cisco.

Eons, the 50-plus media company for loving life on the flipside of 50, today announced $22 million in Series B financing led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from new investors Intel Capital and Humana Inc., as well as existing investors General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital. The financing will fuel Eons' accelerating growth as it continues to inspire boomers to see, learn, and be more on the way to the reachable goal of living to 100.

"We're very excited that Charles River Ventures is taking a lead in this round, especially given their proven track record of investing in companies poised to establish a leadership position in emerging markets," said Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO, Eons. "Boomers are ready to play hard on the Web, and Eons is not only changing the way they connect with each other, but also how corporate America reaches this desirable demographic. Our active community, proprietary tools - such as Eons' search engine cRANKy - and expert advice are shaping a new era of activity on the Web for this audience.”

Taylor added, "We are equally pleased with Intel Capital's investment as well as the participation from our founding venture backers, General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital, whose continued support is a strong endorsement of our market and our strategy."

What a week! We added 7,723 new social networks in the past four days. Wow! Here's a few of them. We've also gotten great ideas, feedback, and suggestions from the folks creating them. It's been fantastic, so thank you!

We worked through the night to make your networks on Ning faster than a speeding bullet. The issues folks saw with our database bug earlier in the week are resolved and, while something new can always show up, our servers are happy as clams under the current high load. God, I hope I didn't just jinx it by saying that :-)

In all seriousness, we've been up, stable, and fast for the past 18 hours and responding to issues within minutes. In total, we took Ning down for 3 hours over the past 4 days. We had intermittent slowdowns for an additional 6 hours. The benefit of monitoring absolutely everything is that we can tell you that we've had 97% uptime since our launch. Not too bad for the first week of a brand spanking new product.

Reuters hopes to draw from the 70,000 subscribers of its messaging service as a starting point for its foray into the fast-growing sector of community websites.

"You will see us, later in the year, launch a version of MySpace for the financial services community," said the chief executive, Tom Glocer. "It won't have the latest hot videos and the 'why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys' blogs. Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models."

The website will also be exclusive to Reuters subscribers. "People don't want to have 100 friend requests from teenage girls in Florida if they are trading the credit derivatives market, but they probably are interested in being able to share research," said Mr Glocer.

But I defend their position on banning the exploit poster, Shoemoney. I think he crossed the line from white hat to black hat when posting the identities of several community members. I think banning was the right thing to do, even without a Terms of Service to cover their ass.

Impersonating someone online is a kind of identity theft, and on a site where you're leaving traces of yourself, a kind of digital "Kilroy was here", using the names and identities of other community members to make a point goes fairly powerfully against the intentions of their product.

1) Tracking outbound links is what caused us to launch MyBlogLog in the first place. Ads are outbound links.
2) This feature was added after users requested it over and over...
3) This is not a Pro-only feature. Free users can look at their stats page and under "What Readers Clicked" they'll see "Filter by: All | Ads | Content".
4) Google has acknowledged this feature (without protest). And, as opposed to the click-through data that Google gives its customers, this info generated by MBL is collected independently of the AdSense program which doesn't appear to be considered confidential information under their terms of service.

In a brilliant marketing move to kick this off, Facebook is donating the February net proceeds from the virtual gifts to charity. After that, they're keeping the money. I would expect this to be a significant revenue generator for them by year-end.

The reason I say this is because "poking" is already such a big activity on Facebook, where you reach out to other users. When you pay money to do the same thing, it will mean more, and people will be sucked into doing it. If and when Facebook launches premium gifts, people will be buying those, too. I'd also expect them to sell really high end "limited edition" icons as well in limited supplies.

A major advance came Jan. 22 with IBM's announcement of a new product called Lotus Connections. It wraps five social networking technologies up into one integrated package—similar to what Microsoft's Office does for traditional desktop productivity software such as Word and Excel. And, if IBM handles this right, its package could rapidly spread the use of so-called Web 2.0 applications in the business world. "While social computing software is perceived as being at the fringe of most large businesses, it's actually moving to the center fast—because it's about how the next generation of employees communicate, and create and share ideas," says Franks Gens, senior vice-president for research at tech market research IDC.

The IBM package includes five applications: profiles, where employees post information about their expertise and interests; communities, which are formed and managed by people with common interests; activities, which are used to manage group projects; bookmarks, where people share documents and Web sites with others; and blogs, where people post ongoing commentaries. "The business market is showing a lot of interest in using social networking tools to improve productivity. It's about helping people find experts and the information they need to get their jobs done," says Steve Mills, the general manager of the software group at IBM (IBM). The commercial version of the package is to be delivered in the second quarter.

Is it any coincidence that IBM announced new social networking software and Getafirstlife, a Second Life parody, debuted within a few hours of each other?

Of course not, IBM getting into social networking is the equivalent of the cab driver touting stocks and the dunce down the street trying to flip real estate. The appropriate response to those aforementioned signals: Sell! The top of the market is here.

IBM launching social networking software (just for those corporate types that just can't wait to produce MySpace-ish pages) is the same as the cabby and the real estate flipper down the street. Translation: The social networking run is over. Goodbye. It's kaput.

In November, MySpace, for the first time, surpassed even Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo.

The bad news is that MySpace reached this point so fast, just three years after its official launch in November 2003, that it has been forced to address problems of extreme scalability that only a few other organizations have had to tackle.

The result has been periodic overloads on MySpace's Web servers and database, with MySpace users frequently seeing a Web page headlined "Unexpected Error" and other pages that apologize for various functions of the Web site being offline for maintenance. And that's why Drew and other MySpace members who can't send or view messages, update their profiles or perform other routine tasks pepper MySpace forums with complaints.

These days, MySpace seems to be perpetually overloaded, according to Shawn White, director of outside operations for the Keynote Systems performance monitoring service. "It's not uncommon, on any particular day, to see 20% errors logging into the MySpace site, and we've seen it as high as 30% or even 40% from some locations," he says. "Compare that to what you would expect from Yahoo or Salesforce.com, or other sites that are used for commercial purposes, and it would be unacceptable." On an average day, he sees something more like a 1% error rate from other major Web sites.

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They're going to a new site, they want to start over.

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it's far more prevalent than you'd ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

Focusing on "lock-in" will fail with these teens - they don't care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.

Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.

Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven't found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.

The numbers that people cite concerning accounts created are astoundingly inaccurate and are worthless for talking about usage or unique participants. (added tx to a comment by Rich)

I should note that i don't think that the answer is "help teens remember passwords." I actually think that this tendency to shed is advantageous in the way that we shed clothes every year because the "old me" is no longer relevant. Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting.

Because subscribers use Photobucket primarily as a means to publish content elsewhere, Welch has a unique window into how traffic is moving around the Web. With a peek into the logs, he weighs in on the "death of myspace debate" rather definitively: Myspace "traffic is going up and to the right. It hasn't flattened at all." But at the same time, he's seeing fractionalization. Specialty networks like the goth site VampireFreaks.com are booming. And as Photobucket moves into the mainstream, its demographics are moving beyond the glitter set. Welch says users are starting to tend toward the 35/40 age range. "A lot of them have kids. Scrapbooking is huge. Two Peas in a Bucket is seeing a lot of traffic."

1) Tell us who you have secret crushes on.
2) We email your crushes asking who they like.
3) If you match we tell you both at same time. If you don't, they'll never know it was you.

Two enterprising and ambitious journalists with the Fife Herald - Adam Morris and Paul Breslin - have launched a MySpace page linked to their paper (circ. 13,590), which is based in the town of Cupar. In just a couple of weeks the site has recruited 400 friends and it is being used, says Morris, "as a tool to get younger folk to give us story tip offs." Two examples: a local lad took a £100 car to Italy and back; revelations of raves in "a secret bunker".

As Morris rightly notes: "It's a totally untapped market for local papers, and it opens up new lines of communication."

Even enthusiastic Stickam users say the site often feels lawless. "People are very vulgar and like to 'get their jollies' from harassing people, mainly girls, to take off their clothes," said Chelsey, a 17-year-old user from Saskatchewan in Canada, who signed up after her 13-year-old sister violated the site's age rules and joined the service.

"I'm pretty sure none of their parents know or even think about the things that they are doing on this site," said Chelsey, who said in an e-mail message that she did not feel comfortable using her last name in an interview.

Other companies that offer Web cam chats say that the technology seems to attract abuse. "There are just some people who, if you give them a Web cam, are going to take off their clothes," said Jason Katz, founder of PalTalk, an eight-year-old service that lets users converse over Web cams on various topics. Unlike Stickam, PalTalk asks for a credit card and charges a monthly fee, which it says prevents minors from signing up.

Mr. Kihioka of Stickam said that in some respects, his site was actually safer than other social networks. Live video feeds let users "know who they are talking to," he said. "Unlike MySpace, it is hard to disguise yourself." But he added that his company had the same concerns about child safety as MySpace and was working on an automated system that would monitor live video feeds for indecency.

The Pandora Community lets you check out other listener's profiles and find shared stations built on multiple users' likes and dislikes. If you're a social network lover, the new community features could be a great way to interact with your fellow music-lovers and discover new favorite songs and artists. And since we're so close to Christmas, don't forget that you can use Pandora to listen to holiday music!

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

Flip.com will offer girls a forum to create "flip books": multimedia scrapbooks of photographs, home-made music videos and other postings. CondeNet hopes to tap into the same creative flair that girls show when they decorate their school lockers or textbooks. The site is Conde Nast's answer to News Corp.'s MySpace, which -- along with similiar sites such as Facebook -- is drawing millions of young users and has made it difficult for magazine publishers to keep teenagers' attention. Flip is scheduled to debut in February, but 200,000 girls will be invited to a test launch today.

"These girls are so creative, they create shrines within their environment," says Dee Salomon, a vice president at CondeNet. "It must be the hormones -- they customize everything."

With readers migrating to the Web in droves, all magazines are under tremendous pressure to come up with Internet strategies, or face oblivion. Advance Publication Inc.'s Conde Nast, owner of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker and GQ, has taken a particularly cautious approach to the Internet until recently. Now, though, the publisher that has been accustomed to being the Alpha Girl of the magazine set is taking steps to avoid becoming just another old-media outcast on the Internet.

The site shouldn't compete with MySpace -- because it can't. Teens (and I say this as a recovering one) are locked into MySpace and a few other megasites for the near future. CondeNet president Sarah Chubb seems to get that. She tells the Journal, "I don't think they'll quit MySpace, but they might tell people on their MySpace page to check out their flip book."

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

Facebook, the social-networking Web site courted by Yahoo! Inc., isn't for sale, board member Peter Thiel said.

"It's going to remain an independent company," Thiel said in an interview last week. "The plan is to actually build it, maybe at some point take it public, but definitely not to sell it."

Facebook, having turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo, is taking a different path than YouTube, which sold itself to Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and MySpace, now owned by News Corp. Thiel, one of Facebook's three board members, said the company is focused finding the best way to make money from its millions of members.

Started in 2004 by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is now one of the fastest growing sites on the Web. Thiel, 39, says the site's college-aged users make it worth $8 billion or more, as much as Viacom Inc.'s MTV music video channel.

The finding comes from a comScore report on U.S. Internet audience numbers for November that's due out later this week.

"Fox Interactive Media is obviously driven primarily by MySpace," comScore analyst Michael Rubin said Monday. "The bulk of their growth is from MySpace."

Fox Interactive Media's total U.S. page views increased to 39.5 million from 38.7 million during November. By contrast, Yahoo’s page views declined to 38 million from 41.6 million.

"Fox Interactive Media passed Yahoo for top property by page views for the first time," UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter wrote on Monday in a report.

The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by sex offenders.

In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, the Arizona Republican and former presidential candidate warned that "technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography." McCain scored 31 of 100 points on a News.com 2006 election guide scoring technology-related votes.

After child pornography or some forms of "obscenity" are found and reported, the Web site must retain any "information relating to the facts or circumstances" of the incident for at least six months. Webmasters would be immune from civil and criminal liability if they followed the specified procedures exactly.

Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain's proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme -- and even stiffer penalties -- on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.

"I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here," said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?"

According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service.

The U.S. Justice Department, for instance, indicted an Alabama man named Jeff Pierson last week on child pornography charges because he took modeling photographs of clothed minors with their parents' consent. The images were overly "provocative," a prosecutor claimed.

The other section of McCain's legislation targets convicted sex offenders. It would create a federal registry of "any e-mail address, instant-message address, or other similar Internet identifier" they use, and punish sex offenders with up to 10 years in prison if they don't supply it.

Then, any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender.

I believe in a theory I'll call "The Stupidity of Crowds". Here's the basic idea: if just one person or a small group of people builds a website, they have to be at least moderately intelligent. Buying servers and writing programs is somewhat hard and takes a little bit of brainpower. This means that the content for their site will be similarly intelligent and thus it won't be of interest to the vast majority of Internet users.

The glorious thing about the Internet, however, is that it allows us to aggregate the combined stupidity of literally millions of people. No longer do you have to try to play towards the lowest common denominator -- now you can actually have the lowest common denominator build your site for you. No single mortal could possibly come up with the content you find on the average MySpace, let alone the hideous color scheme, garish backgrounds, and awful auto-playing background music. No, something like that takes The Stupidity of Crowds.

For $.99 cents a month FakeYourSpace lets you buy "hotties" both male and female to add to your MySpace profile as friends and what's more they even post 2 comments a week. Oh and fear not, those comments will be germaine because you'll be the on writing them.

FakeYourSpace claims to make it "easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend." Which is really all we want right - the illusion of friends?

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall. FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend. It doesn't stop there however. Maybe you want to appear as if you have a Model for a lover. FakeYourSpace can make this happen! The possibilities are endless. You can have our Models leave you any type of customized message you may wish. Want to make an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend jealous? No problem.

Wannabe Petes or Nikkis will be able to upload a video clip to the channel's revived website E4.com, giving reasons as to why they should star in the eighth season of 'Big Brother'. The auditions, which will be rated by other users and studied by producers Endemol and Channel 4 commissioning editors, with at least one online applicant guaranteed a place in the 'Big Brother' house.

The 'Big Brother' feature follows a similar path to YouTube and MySpace by offering users the chance to become instant celebrities with their homemade videos, which they can post on E4.com.

Andy Duncan, chief executive of Channel 4, said: "E4 already has a powerful connection with younger audiences and looms large in their media consumption habits.

"These viewers are the first generation to grow up with the internet and they are driving the phenomenal growth of social networking online and of user generated content as a mainstream entertainment medium. We think it's a perfect platform to launch this initiative and propel Channel 4 into one of digital media's fastest growing market places."

I haven't seen the service but Fanning explained it to me this way: Using an add on or a software download, Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing. As Rupture tracks each member's playing over time, these personalized profiles evolve. And players will be able to chat in groups or with other individuals and download other addons and game demos.

Mediocrity is the only possible result of a wide sampling of opinion or input. The only idea that can survive such a mechanism is one consistent with the lowest common denominator. The mob works to ensure that all other results are weeded out. Now, we might think that it is the highest common denominator that is promoted in this environment, but it's just not so. The "highest" anything is largely held by the masses as being discriminatory and elitist. So only the lowest common denominator wins out. The point is that in this sort of environment excellence does not survive.

Excellence is not the sum of opinions. Excellence is not born of consensus. Excellence is by its very nature something far outside the average. In fact, not even good is found in the average. Average is comfortable. Average requires no great effort. Average requires nothing exceptional. Average anything is..., well, just mediocre.

I'm not anti-amateur, I'm just anti-mediocrity. Yes, low barriers to entry allow us to find the diamonds in the rough - the excellent writers and thinkers who otherwise would not have a publishing platform. Unfortunately, it also means we have to put up with a million yahoos who think they know way more than they do. Years ago I heard a minister say "if anyone tells you they have all the answers, run the other way." That's why I steer clear of Web2.0 pundits.

Mediocrity and decadence: these are now our birthright and we work feverishly to ensure that they're the primary features of our social endeavors. This sort of thing has happened before. History is filled with stories of how societies, great and small, have followed this path. We can read about their beginnings and their inevitable endings, in books - and now in the so–very–accurate and august Wikipedia (monument to the wisdom of crowds - /sarcasm).

The waxing relevant engines of our culture are teaching us to follow a pat, clichéd script that has played out over and over again for millennia. Western culture is on the downhill slope and gathering speed toward the brick wall at the bottom. I’m talking about the hill where, at the bottom, lie the heaps of rubble that history refers to: great cultures all. Welcome to culture 2.0.

So, in a nutshell, Andy believes that crowds are grunting masses of baboons, and that anything that surveys a group of people will inevitably result in mediocrity. The great are pulled down amongst the rabble. Pretty depressing, right? At one point, Andy says that "Western culture is on the downhill slope and gathering speed toward the brick wall at the bottom." It made me want to crawl into bed with a copy of Wuthering Heights and a nice bottle of Dom Perignon and wait for the mob with pitchforks to attack my castle.

Despite buzz to the contrary, MyBlogLog.com is not yet the property of serial acquirer Yahoo Inc. This comes straight from Scott Rafer, the former CEO of search engine Feedster and now CEO of the popular blog community tracker.

"We've got a lot of balls in the air at the moment," Rafer said. Rumors that Yahoo was buying MyBlogLog for $10 million have been floating around the blogosphere since the Web 2.0 "summit" earlier this month. MyBlogLog encourages people to build connections and communities around their favorite blogs.

One of Yahoo's PR firms, OutkastPR, emailed us to say that this story is innacurate, and that Yahoo has not acquired MyBlogLog. We dug a little deeper with some insiders and it appears that Yahoo and MyBlogLog are in very early acquisistion discussions, and nothing more. Founder Scott Rafer was completely silent when asked about the rumors today - suggesting he didn’t mind getting all the press attention.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, is seen as part of a strategy by Universal to test provisions of a federal law that provides a "safe harbor" to Internet companies that follow certain procedures to filter out copyrighted works. The law requires sites to remove such content after being notified by the copyright holder.

If Universal can win in court, it is likely to gain leverage in negotiating licensing terms with user-driven services - just at the moment that those services are attracting deep-pocketed partners.

Earlier this year, Universal's chief executive, Doug Morris, publicly identified the YouTube video-sharing site and MySpace as copyright infringers. Universal successfully negotiated to take a stake in YouTube shortly before it was sold to Google for $1.65 billion, according to executives briefed on the deal who spoke on condition of anonymity. But licensing talks with MySpace recently reached an impasse.

MySpace said in a statement yesterday that it complied with the requirements of federal law. The company said it had kept Universal, a unit of Vivendi, "closely apprised of our industry-leading efforts to protect creators’ rights, and it's unfortunate they decided to file this unnecessary and meritless litigation."

They're prison inmates and many, including those on Texas' death row, have moved their cell-based ponderings from isolated anti-death penalty Internet pages to the popular social networking Web site favored by the younger set: MySpace.

At least 30 Texas death row inmates have MySpace pages created for them. On these personal pages they detail their likes and dislikes, just like anyone else.

"I think I'm a pretty funny guy. I have a wacked sense of humor," writes Randy Halprin, who was convicted in the 2000 shooting death of an Irving police officer. "I can be a big kid at heart. I'm a hopeless (and I mean HOPELESS) romatic (sic)."

To be clear, no Texas inmate has Internet access. Instead, inmates send letters, journal entries or blog postings to friends and families who create the pages for them and post their writings for them.

"This is not new," explained Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "The reality is that for many years death row inmates have had family and friends on their case, on the Internet, oftentimes to get pen pals and in some cases raise money for the defense."

Washington-Younger voters turned out in higher numbers in Tuesday's US congressional elections, giving a lift to Democratic candidates in a contest that gave the party control of the US House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years. "This is a new generation," Hans Riemer, political director of Rock the Vote, an organization that seeks to mobilize young voters, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "They're more involved, more engaged, and less cynical."

Exit polls showed that voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast 13 per cent of all votes, up from 11 per cent in the 2002 elections, the last non-presidential national election. Voter turnout is typically higher in presidential elections.

That increase is important because the proportion of young voters has become smaller in the same time period, causing the increase to outpace the growth in turnout among all voters, Rock the Vote said.

Young voters traditionally favour Democratic candidates and did so by a 22 point margin on Tuesday, the organization said, citing exit polls.

Share information with online friends and guild members.

Find people to play with on your server

Connect on a more personal level by viewing photos of other warcraft players

Look up the jerk who just ganked you.

The bigger question, of course, is whether virtual worlds need social networks - aren't they social enough already? It's tempting to say that Warcraft users might not be crazy about MySpace-style sites, but that doesn’t appear to be the case: WoW's MySpace page has over 100,000 friends and some excellent tools to customize your profile. There are also plenty of popular forums related to MMOGs, so there’s an outside chance a social network could work.